On Futurology

If history studies our past and social sciences study our present, what is the study of our future? Future(s) Studies (colloquially called "future(s)" by many of the field's practitioners) is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to hypothesize the possible, probable, preferable, or alternative future(s).

One of the fundamental assumptions in future(s) studies is that the future is plural rather than singular, that is, that it consists of alternative future(s) of varying degrees of likelihood but that it is impossible in principle to say with certainty which one will occur.

less people fixing cars (will be computers fixing most problems, and many of these computers will be owned by car sharing programs)

automotive enthusiasts. They will still exist for sure but as people grow up in a world of automated cars they wont have any experience driving so the transition to a car user to an enthusiast will be much further. Purchasing expensive cars will be seen as completely frivolous, today these purchases can be slightly justified as a mode of transportation.

parking control authority

less paramedics (high % of calls are to automobile accidents)

more:

Depending on energy sources, I could potentially see a self driving RV becoming huge. Road trips would be amazing as each morning when you woke up you could be in a completely new location.

less people fixing cars (will be computers fixing most problems, and many of these computers will be owned by car sharing programs)

True, but not just because computers fix the cars, but also because electrical cars by their nature need far less maintenance then a combustion engine. Estimates are that they will cost something like a third of that of current cars to maintain.

Why less multilane highways and signs? There'll still be the same number of vehicles needing much the same space, and it's safer to have up-to-the-moment signing that their systems can read rather than assume that they all have updated internal maps.

Self driving cars can drive much closer together, literally inches apart. Humans always have to leave large room for safety. This not only saves you a ton of space, but also reduces fuel usage. Self driving cars could also reduce traffic jams a lot.

it's safer to have up-to-the-moment signing that their systems can read rather than assume that they all have updated internal maps.

Wireless transmission should be a lot easier to keep up to date then some physical sign that might be obscured by a tree or something. Maybe we don't even need self driving cars for that, even a car with HUD and a human driver could already benefit by replacing road signs with a digital map. Of course the signs won't disappear until all cars are required to handle digital maps by law.

Good points. I'd suspect we'd want to keep wide safety distances on s/d for arbitrary safety standards (my big prediction is for accident rate tolerance to plummet faster than the actual rate of accidents), but there'll be less jams once cars can communicate with one another and we could see much more cars per mile.
Once signs disappear, we'll know there's essentially no more human drivers - not for a long while yet! But most people certainly underestimate the change s/d will bring.

Why would vehicles need the same amount of space? Eventually cars are going to be able to travel far closer together at high speeds then what humans can do safely. Why would you need signs if everything is automated/computerized?

When self driving cars first become popular, this shift wont happen. But a few 100 years from now I can see this being the case.

Oh, centuries or even decades on, yes. But in the first 50 years or so, I can well imagine people revelling in the sense of complete safety on the roads for the first time ever, allowing closer distances as confidence builds.

The self driving RV is a great idea. You don't need to own a home! It can cost as much as a house and drop you off at work in the morning. It also makes relocated across the country for a new job a breeze. Of course it will have negative impact on community. New innovations will be needed to give people a sense of communal belonging.

It's essentially a name game. Do you call those things still "taxi"? I think in the end all street transport (personal cars, buses, taxis, etc.) will be replaced by self driving cars. The car will be no longer be something you own, but become part of the infrastructure. A click on your mobile phone and one of those cars will drive by and pick you up. It will give you the convenience of a personal car, without the cost of it or the waiting times for a bus.

The real downside of self driving cars is the massive job loss for taxi and lorry drivers - as s/d cars won't need regular rest breaks, the efficiency savings will drive freight fleet replacement before s/d taxi services arrive. Socially, they will deliver potentially much cheaper personal transport and somewhat cheaper goods as delivery networks become that much cheaper and more efficient; as well as likely massively reducing accident rates (95% due to human error, mostly due to looked-but-didn't-see change blindness and objects in the blind spot).

Mass transit will still be the fast way to get around due to not being blocked by other traffic, but there'll be very little reason to own a car in a major city once electric s/d cars in a range of sizes become widely hireable: especially if someone implements induction coils in road surfaces to give EV infinite range.

Perhaps at first, but why not just subscribe to a driverless car service? You can just summon a car from your phone whenever you need one. It drives you to work in the morning and there is no need to find a place to park it.

The world is going to be a lot smaller, that's for sure. When in full implementation, this technological advance will do for us what cars did for those who used to get around by foot and horse.

More quickly than we can imagine, I think most people will not know, or care, where they are at geographically. It will be like being a kid again and having your parents driving you everywhere.

Distances will be measured in time instead of distance traveled. We won't be asking, "How far?" We will ask, "How long?" We already do this but not to the extent that we will... it will be more like airplane travel, "How long is the flight?"

Maybe the start of a typical workers work day could begin as soon as they sit down in one of these transportation machines because you wouldn't have to work at a particular location anymore. You'll sit in one of the machines, it'll brief you as to your work duties for the day and then drop you off at a work location. These vehicles could also make it easier to shift people from location to location based on the amount of activity at different locations throughout the day at strategic times. I.E. you'd be switched to another location during your break/lunch because you'd just take your break inside the comfortable transport.

Those are pretty much given - what i'm interested in is the types of transgressive activities and behaviors that will arise when the technology becomes widespread and commonplace. From relatively benign things involving sex/drugs/alcohol (e.g. input a scenic drive on a beautiful day and trip LSD with a friend :) ) all the way to malicious things like low-tech DoS techniques to cause delays and even finding unoccupied cars driving themselves and messing with/confusing them in various ways. All sorts of fun, creative, weird -- and dangerous/dickish -- activities will come about.

Idle time delivery - your car goes and picks up your mail, UPS deliveries, etc. when you are not using it

I think this would also open up a way to completely automate retail. Grocery delivery already exist, but is often expensive and not really adopted by the masses, having a fleet of self driving cars or even just self driving scooters along with a mostly automated warehouse could reduce the cost of it quite a lot and replace retail as we know it.

I doubt delivery will decrease. Rather, I think it will increase and in-person shopping will decrease. Google is ramping up its shopping, local warehouse, local storage locker, local business partnership, and driverless car businesses to vertically integrate a driverless delivery system from stores to your house. UPS, etc. will have driverless pods making cross-country trips. It will all be extremely cheap without the need to employ delivery drivers. It will also be fast. A driverless delivery pod could get from the store to your door in less time than it would take you to make a round trip. Long haul trucking would also be driverless, not to mention drones and unmanned ships carrying products across oceans.

As telecommuting increases and the demand for human labor decreases, I think you'll actually see less commuting, rather than longer commutes.

It should also be noted that the US employs 3.8 million motor vehicle operators, while Google employs less than 100 engineers for driverless cars. That's a ton of job loss, and one won't ever balance out the other.

I should add that there will be more restaurant delivery, since the negligible price of a driverless delivery trip could just be incorporated into a restaurant's regular operating costs and prices, making delivery free.

Fear of job loss should almost never inhibit the pursuit of new technology. This is counterproductive to society as a whole. The ultimate goal of technology is convenience and to create a hedonist/utopian society where no one has to work at all.

Fewer car sales, period. Car sharing services obviously need fewer cars to serve a population. All the cars you see lining residential streets, and all the cars in driveways, are superfluous. But (driverless) RV sales probably would increase.